'Love': Captivating Confusion

Watch a clip from the film "Like Someone in Love," an official selection of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. In Tokyo, a young prostitute develops an unexpected connection with a widower over a period of two days. (Photo/Video: Sundance Selects)

For the first minute or so of "Like Someone in Love"—black screen, white titles, jazz piano—you could mistake this mysteriously beautiful meditation on the ways of love for a film by Woody Allen. But the resemblance stops at the music. The setting is Tokyo, brooding sumptuously, and the filmmaker is Abbas Kiarostami, an Iranian by birth and nationality but a distinguished citizen of world cinema. And in listening to the music, you could take Ella Fitzgerald's rendition of the title song to be the main thematic cue. Yet an equally apt comment on the haunting tale comes from Duke Ellington's "Solitude."

A young woman and two men constitute the unlikely—and dangerously unstable—triangle of the plot, which turns on mistaken identities. Aki (Rin Takanashi), is a student who moonlights as a call girl, and conceals her night work from her possessive and occasionally violent boyfriend, Noriaki ( Ryo Kase). Irresistibly pretty and sweetly vague, Aki is dispatched to the suburbs to visit a special client, or so she is told. He turns out to be a professor of sociology, Takashi ( Tadashi Okuno), an elderly gent who is understandably enchanted by his lissome visitor, but not, as Aki fails to understand, so much interested in having sex with her as in the exquisite pleasure of her company.

There is love, the movie tells us, then there is love. Understanding is in short supply on all sides, and it keeps getting clouded by the folly of youth, the parallel folly of age—Takashi says at several points that everything will work out, but it won't—and by a loneliness that amounts to solitary confinement.

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Rin Takanashi
Sundance Selects

Mr. Kiarostami is a poet of the oblique. As in his previous film, "Certified Copy" (which was set in Tuscany, and his first feature to be made outside Iran), what people think can be inferred, though only up to a point, from what they say, and what they say can be less revealing than what's left unsaid. The movie's most extraordinary sequence is preceded by evasion. Aki chooses to ignore a long and affecting succession of phone calls from her grandmother, who has come to town for the day and desperately wants to see her. Later that evening she takes a long cab ride to the professor's house, and her guilt, and regrets, and nostalgia for some sweeter time, play out wordlessly on her face. The camera turns away from her only to register what she sees, an endless ribbon of flickering neon and soulless streets.

Lest all of this sound impossibly humorless, "Like Someone in Love" does have its playful side. At certain moments you can't tell, and aren't supposed to, who's talking to whom just outside the camera's frame. And lustrously photographed reflections play their own intricate games. (The cinematographer was Katsumi Yanagijima.) Still, the greatest fascination is watching these three people when they're planted firmly inside the frame, talking at cross-purposes while trying to perceive one another in the reflected light of their needs and risky assumptions.

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Giovanni Arcuri
Adopt Films

'Caesar Must Die'

The Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, have made two transcendently powerful films: the 1977 "Padre Padrone," about a Sardinian shepherd's son seeking escape from his barbaric existence, and, in 1982, "The Night of the Shooting Stars," about a woman's ecstatic memories of her childhood in a Tuscan village during World War II. Their new feature, "Caesar Must Die" seeks transcendence in the interactions of a play within a play within a film. It's a docudrama, mostly in stunning black-and-white, about real-life inmates in a high-security Roman prison rehearsing a production of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," then putting it on stage. "I understand what Shakespeare meant," one of them says, "but how to get it across to the audience?" I understand what the Tavianis meant—a multilayered allegory of tyranny, freedom and the power of art—but much of it seems contrived or murky. What works best is what's readily accessible, the startling power of performers who understand the drama all too well.

Watch a clip from the Italian film "Caesar Must Die." Inmates at a high-security prison in Rome prepare for a public performance of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." (Photo/Video: Adopt Films)

These are convicted murderers playing murderers, convicted conspirators plotting to take a noble life. Thrilled with their respite from prison routine, they're also inflamed by the personal power that comes with impersonating power, though at least one of them is no stranger to self-reflection: Cosimo Rega, the leonine figure who plays Cassius, published a book called "Autobiography of a Lifer." Their acting isn't polished, but their rage against authority is palpably authentic.

The prison calls its project a theatrical laboratory. The film functions as a laboratory too, one in which we can test our own perceptions of what's spontaneous or rehearsed, and our willingness to suspend disbelief. (The Tavianis do some suspending for us by gliding seamlessly between the prison's hallways and cells and its stage, where a few simple props summon up the Bard's English version of Roman reality.) As you might expect, Shakespeare's language challenges the prisoners at first, then opens them up as they master it; that's what art is supposed to do, expand our horizons in life. But "Caesar Must Die" ends on a note of unexpected tough-mindedness. Standing in his cell and addressing the camera, Mr. Rega says: "Since I got to know art, this cell has become a prison." Horizons have their limits for someone serving a life sentence.

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A scene from '5 Broken Cameras.'
Kino Lorber

'5 Broken Cameras'

Two of this year's five Oscar nominees for best documentary concern the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Earlier this month I reviewed one of them, "The Gatekeepers," which was made by the Israeli journalist Dror Moreh. The other one, "5 Broken Cameras," can be seen as a companion piece to Mr. Moreh's film, even though that wasn't the intention of its co-directors, Emad Burnat, a Palestinian farmer turned ad hoc journalist, and Guy Davidi, an Israeli filmmaker and peace activist. Their purpose was to document, from the Palestinian point of view, the disputes that continue to rage over land in the occupied territories and over the construction of Israeli settlements. That they have done, with conspicuous success.

Palestinian farmer and family man Emad Burnat and Israeli activist and filmmaker Guy Davidi talk about their collaboration across political and cultural divides to create "5 Broken Cameras". Film clip and photo courtesy of Kino Lorber Inc.

"When something happens in my village," Mr. Burnat says at the outset, "my instinct is to film it." His instinct, like his sharp eye for detail, has served him well. His first camera was supposed to document nothing less, or more, than the arrival and infancy of Gibreel, one of his four sons. But the man with the camera was asked by villagers to film local events, which included nonviolent demonstrations against Israeli settlements and a barrier wall that infringed, the villagers contended, on Palestinian land. (Later an Israeli court would rule in their favor, and, years after the court decision, the barrier would be torn down.)

In the course of time, Mr. Burnat's village, Bil'in, became a flash point for such demonstrations, while he was anything but a passive observer. His footage, he acknowledges with quiet pride, was used to encourage demonstrations in other villages, and the man with the camera—all five cameras of the evocative title were broken when demonstrators clashed with Israeli soldiers or police—became a man with a mission. I wanted to know more about Mr. Burnat, and his political evolution, but "5 Broken Cameras" is short on facts and, like the demonstrations themselves, provocative by nature. Still, it casts a baleful light on anguishing, seemingly incessant scenes of tear gas hurled, bullets fired, villagers fleeing for their lives and, on one shocking occasion, a life lost as the camera rolls. This is how the conflict looks from the other side of the barrier.

—J.M.

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'In the Mood for Love'

DVD Focus

'In the Mood for Love' (2000)

No filmed meditation on love has ever been more beautifully mysterious than Wong Kar-wai's peek-a-boo romance in which little is said, not much happens and less is explained. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, next-door neighbors in a crowded Hong Kong apartment building in 1962, are attracted to each other even before they realize that their (unseen) spouses are having an affair. More of a mood story than a love story, it's all about sustaining a state of exquisite melancholy in the face of desire. Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin did the exquisite cinematography.

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'Man With a Movie Camera'

'Man With a Movie Camera' (1929)

A landmark in the evolution of the medium, Dziga Vertov's silent masterpiece opens with a main-title declaration: "This experimental work aims at creating a truly international absolute language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theatre and literature." Then, in a mere 68-minute running time, the film delivers fully on its grand promise with scenes of urban life in the Soviet Union and idealized visions of industrialization (Vertov wasn't much interested in the countryside), as well as remarkably sophisticated examples—montages, action shots, symbolic images—of what cinema alone can do.

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Marlon Brando in a scene of 'Julius Caesar.'
Mondadori/Everett Collection

'Julius Caesar' (1953)

No, not another prison production, unless you think the term applies to the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer of the 1950s. (Many filmmakers and writers at the time thought it did.) Joseph L. Mankiewicz's impressive version of the play has a cast that only the MGM of that time could bring together: Marlon Brando as Marc Antony; James Mason as Brutus; John Gielgud as Cassius; Greer Garson as Calpurnia; Edmond O'Brien as Casca; Deborah Kerr as Portia; an Aussie named Michael Pate as Flavius and, not to be outdone before being done in, Louis Calhern as Caesar.

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